Starting from the simple concept of “inhabited,” the two artists, NikiNeuts and VAM, have independently developed their own visions of a new inner world. In response to the assaults of current events, the artists deploy ceremonies to save our lives from the slow erosion of shared values. Though profoundly different, their two worlds notably echo around the nature that invites itself into their (for) interior. Domesticated and artificialized for NikiNeuts, sovereign and salvific for VAM.

NikiNeuts / VAM Habitée By Stéphanie Pioda, Art Historian and Critic The adjective could have been made plural, as the works of VAM and NikiNeuts are "inhabited" by their questions and their own history that brings them back to a comparable original flaw which, thanks to art, becomes resilience and transcendence. But the singular form adopted here emphasizes that, while the artists are driven by a common energy, each develops her own universe with specificities – such as the opposition in the treatment of materials, meticulous or rough – and similarities. Hence the fluidity and clarity that emerge from the renewed dialogue between the two artists today. However, one should not consider their works as self-portraits, even though they are innervated by biographical pieces, as it would overlook that VAM and NikiNeuts are engaged in both an intimate and universal quest and in an evolutionary process of companionship born of their friendship. Their works are rather like details of those grand romantic landscape paintings that expressed a state of mind, an inner world, and a certain melancholy. Let us then pause for a moment before the "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog" by Caspar David Friedrich and dive into this new exhibition to celebrate this nature in which the artists have taken refuge to regenerate, to step back from the frenzy of society, and to return to the essentials. Here again, the connection with romantic painters is inevitable, through the words of Baudelaire, "For me, romanticism is the most recent, the most current expression of the beautiful. [...] Romanticism signifies modern art, that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, striving towards the infinite, expressed by all the means that the arts possess." Beyond the search for the experience of the beautiful and the sublime, VAM and NikiNeuts remain humble while tackling the pride of a humanity that still always positions itself in a relationship of force and domination with nature. They have forgotten that they are just one element of the Whole and that reconnecting with nature is necessary to regain human integrity and become aware of our finitude and thus, the importance of our passage on earth has something futile. Arrogance and hubris stick to the skin of humanity that has been doing as it pleases since the mythological nights, like an Icarus who, despite the warnings of his father Daedalus, flies to his demise by getting too close to the sun.